Whether it’s a chance encounter with a Mormon missionary or an intimate conversation with a friend, most people have gone through one of the most awkward possible social interactions: proselytization. So, you can perhaps you can begin to imagine how intense an experience it was for a man in

I want to be evil and trump an ace Just to see my partner's face I want to be nasty, I want to be cruel I want to be daring, I want to shoot pool. -Eartha Kitt, “I Want To Be Evil” Probably the biggest and earliest clue

I want to start this with a story of where I came from, a rural county just outside a medium-sized city in Virginia. Now, even when I was a kid, it was a pretty poor place. I knew that much even before I developed a lot of political and social

As a historian, the one unending debate that always comes up that I can never muster any interest in is the argument over the so-called “Great Man Theory” or, to be more equitable, “Great Person Theory.” It’s not that I don’t agree with the fundamental point that we

I really wanted to write a little fluff on a particular historical figure I happen to find interesting. However, the viciousness being targeted against trans people and the unhinged rhetoric of the so-called "gender criticals" has instead made me think of all this from the perspective of a

It's time for me to come out of the closet. Not that closet, but the closet I share with people as diverse as Mike Stoklasa from Red Letter Media, Hidden Figures and Ma star Octavia Spencer, and the singer Jason Molina. That's right, I believe in

(This essay is a revised and slightly expanded version of a post written for my old blog Trash Culture). If you’ve followed me for a long time, you might have picked up that one of my favorite sources of nostalgia is Married…With Children. Watching it as the sort

Or Why Do We Keep Letting Journalists Write About History, Seriously. In an interview, the Nigerian-American novelist Uzodinma Iweala stated how “the world really doesn’t acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don’t really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news